Verizon’s Droid: After iPhone, and AT&T at $100 per phone

By: Peter Chubb | Posted: November 11, 2009 | No Comments
Filed under: Cell Phones, Handsets

A recent report has surfaced that Motorola has shifted 100,000 units of the Droid handset over the weekend. Mark McKechnie, an analyst for Broadpoint AmTech said that the number of sales was “encouraging.” However, when you compare that to the launch of the iPhone 3GS, it does not look that great.

Fortune Brainstorm Tech has decided to look a little closer into these figures, and has suggested that there is a problem. The thing is, people have been comparing Motorola to Apple, we know that the first iPhone sold 270,000 units in its first two days, the latest iPhone 3GS sold 1 million handsets in the first three days.

There are those who foresee that Motorola will struggle to shift 1 million handsets by the end of the year. Verizon now have a problem, they have spent $100 million in an ad campaign for the Droid, where they have even gone as low as slating the AT&T network.

When this figure is broken down, this means that the ad campaign has cost Verizon $100 per sale, the handsets only sell for $199 following a mail-in-rebate. However, Fortune Brainstorm Tech believes that AT&T was the intended target of the ads, and not to try and shift more Droid handsets.

It is no secret that Verizon have been losing customers to AT&T, the reason for this is simple, Verizon does not have the Apple iPhone, but AT&T does. This is something that might change when AT&T lose its exclusivity in 2010.

READ MORE: Verizon Droid